Dion, grimacing and grunting, reversed the grip and drove the pommel through its skull, and the crack of it shuddered up through all the noise, and he tore the blade one way, cutting through a chunk of its body as the swing threw the bird off of the edge.
Through his fighting, Dion did not have the attention to spare to notice how the grooves along the blade were darkening with a nearly black red colour..
Thereafter, the awakened birds kept rushing through the gaps in the windows, all raging straight for him.
Glass crunched beneath his feet and the slice of the sharp edge through the air and ultimately, through the bodies of birds resounded right beneath the howls of the wind and the birds screeching. Blood sprayed wildly and bodies fell second after second.
Dion was by no means at all skilled with a blade. That was why he had suffered that initial injury, and it was why, through the fight, even despite the lack of hesitation in his violence, birds would slash their talons through his arms, or his torso, with one having cut against the side of his leg, and another, across his neck.
Despite that, with the effects of Thirst, as nearly two dozen bird corpses littered the floor, he was still able to hold his ground, even bleeding and under constant threat.
’Not using blood manipulation is damned hard!’
The ability had hardly been with him for a day, but even with that, when it felt like such a natural extension of him, he had to commit a part of his attention to stopping himself from using it.
The longsword skewered through a bird charging right before him, and with it impaled, he used it to smash against another coming at him from his side.
Eventually, the last of them came through in a staggered trio, and he cut them down in a flurry of slashes, sending blood flying in the wind and their bodies falling.
Thereupon, as the screeching stopped, he stood in the centre of his carnage, pulling for breath a little harder. He felt untold gratefulness for his Endurance in that moment as the flurry of system messages filled his ears for the two and a half dozen birds that he had killed.
{You have felled a Level 7 Destitute Robin, harvesting its essences. Your Dexterity, Agility, and Perception have been nourished significantly.}
{You have felled a Level 14 Destitute Starling, harvesting its essences. Your Dexterity, Agility, and Perception have been nourished significantly.}
{You have felled a Level 12 Destitute Starling, harvesting its essences. Your Dexterity, Agility, and Perception have been nourished.}
{You have felled a Level 15 Destitute Pidgeon, harvesting its essences. Your Dexterity, Agility, and Perception have been nourished slightly.}
{ Your Agility has been enriched to F++ }
The floor around him was covered in feathers and blood and the torn apart remains of things that had been ordinary birds before the rain had touched them, and he stood with his palm’s flesh cut through by his vestige, with the edges of the blade darkened with a red aura, and blood dripping off of the tip leaning down.
He had killed all of them, and yet his expression didn’t ease in the slightest from its tension, because hardly a few seconds later, the building shook.
Something struck the outer wall hard enough that the floor jumped beneath his boots, and sixty people screamed at once behind him.
A bird call sound came in from outside, lower than anything the flock had made. It resounded again, and the wall beside the broken windows cracked from the ceiling down to the floor with dust pouring out of the seam.
The crack widened, and masonry came in heavy chunks that shattered across the tiles, and a huge animal forced its way through the hole it had made.
Its wingspan filled the breach, widening the hole as it forced its way in, tts feathers the colour of wet concrete.
The bird’s body was at least three times bigger than a grown man’s, with a beak hooked and thick enough that the piece of wall still caught in it looked small.
Its talons gouged furrows through the tile and into the concrete beneath as they thudded to the floor. It stood in the rain, and the wreckage, and its head turned until one yellow eye found Dion across the floor, its head leaning at an unsettling angle.
The bird lunged with a harsh beat of its wings that shot it across the floor, throwing the standing water out in a sheet, and the gust of it alone pushed his feet back through the wet.
As its beak lanced for his chest like a ram, Dion swung.
The blade struck the side of its head, and the impact came back up his arm and into his shoulder, and the edge skated off it.
’Motherfuck!’
He roared mentally as the impact sent him skidding back across the blood and rain wet ground. The raven had immediately disengaged from the attack slightly as a bit of its feathers spilled down with a thin line cut across its beak.
’Even with all the enhancement that the sword has gotten, it still couldn’t cut through?!’ He thought urgently as the recoil of the attack blew his guard open, throwing his sword-wielding arm high and backwards.
"Dion, watch out!" Madeline’s voice shouted audibly enough even beneath the wind from somewhere behind him.
The bird’s head snapped from the blow in its short retreat, and it screeched so close that his vision shuddered, and its wing came round in a flat sweep that caught him across the chest and threw him off his feet.
His back slammed into a concrete pillar, and the air burst out of his lungs with a harsh cough, and the longsword nearly tore free of his grip.
Dion’s vision spun and distorted from the impact against his head, and through that shaken vision, he saw the bird beat its wings hard once more, shooting forward across the floor straight for him.
He kicked himself off the pillar, throwing himself to the ground as its talons crashed through a large chunk of the pillar where his body should have been.
Dion had fallen right below it, over the wet floor as its beak opened wide enough that he could see the ridged pale of its throat.
The raven rapidly yanked its talons free from the pillar as Dion brought the blade up, and the bird’s talon came down on his wrist, driving his arm flat against the ground.
The weight of it pinned him there, and its beak came driving down at his face; his eyes widened, and his pupils strained into sharp slits as their colour pulsed as red as his blood.
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